ROUSSEAU,
JEAN JACQUES

(June 28, 1712–July 2, 1778), was a Swiss-born French philosopher, writer and political theorist. He was made famous by his essay on how arts and sciences corrupt human behavior, 1749. His works include: writing for Diderot’s Encyclopedie, 1745; Origin of the Inequality of Man, 1755; Confessions, 1782; and The Social Contract, 1762, which influenced the French Revolution.

In the didactic novel Emilius and Sophia, 1762, vol.III, Book IV, he wrote:

I will confess to you, that the majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel has its influence upon my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers; with all their pomp of diction, how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a Book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?

It is possible that the Person whose history it relates be Himself a mere man? Does it contain the language of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity in His manners! What affecting goodness in His instructions! What sublimity in His maxims! What profound wisdom in His discourses! What presence of mind! What sagacity and propriety in His answers! How great the command over His passions! Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live, suffer, and die, without weakness and without ostentation! …

The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospel, the marks of whose truths are so striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero. …

Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Jesus Christ are those of a God.

Should we suppose the Gospel was a story, invented to please? It is not in this manner that we forge tales; for the actions of Socrates, of which no person has the least doubt, are less satisfactorily attested than those of Jesus Christ. Such a supposition, in fact, only shifts the difficulty without removing it; it is more conceivable that a number of persons should agree to write such a history, than that one should furnish the subject of it.542

In 1762, in his work Emile; ou, De l’Education, Jean Jacques Rousseau verbalized:

Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.543

I shall always maintain that whoso says in his heart, “There is no God,” while he takes the name of God upon his lips, is either a liar or a madman.544

Where is the man who owes nothing to the land in which he lives? Whatever that land may be, he owes to it the most precious thing possessed by man, the morality of his actions and the love of virtue.545